Review | “Mystery Fields” + “In the Shadow of the Bomb” by The British Stereo Collective
A revisionist, and very British, take on analog synthesizer music and early electronic pop
Originally released in 2023, Mystery Fields is the debut record from The British Stereo Collective (AKA Stoke On Trent, UK-based Phil Heeks, AKA The New Electric Frontier, and one half of synth duo The Eternal Machine).
Preoccupied with a quasi-imaginary sound universe resonating with obscure soundtracks for regional television shows and quaint documentary music, mixed with a heady knowledge of idiosyncratic library records and computer game sonic aesthetics, the LP promises and delivers “a stunning homage to ‘70s BBC LPs and vintage soundtrack compilations”.
Now hugely expanded for CD as Super Deluxe Compact Disc Audio, the album’s original 20 tracks are enhanced and complemented by a further 16 tracks, featuring new compositions, remixes, and radical re-workings of many of the tracks from the original album.
Early video games, ringtones, jingles, and toy music front a playful facade supported by compositional strength and inventive orchestration, often incorporating traditional instruments like flute or acoustic guitar.
Reminiscent of baroque chamber music in terms of their mannered melodic lines, at once tonally reserved and affectedly pretty, the tracks build worlds both imposingly stately and frivolously decorative.
Analog synthesizers and other artificial sonic effects are predominant in every arrangement.
Still, the retro vibe is not consistent either thematically or chronologically: the record alludes to multiple styles of '70s electronic music, from hummable anthems reminiscent of Jean Michel-Jarre to more folksy space ambient in the vein of Mike Oldfield.
Heeks wears his influences proudly, declaring in the liner notes:
“The album is my homage to a beloved era of classic TV themes, ‘space music’ and library LPs, inspired by the combined influences of Vangelis, Jeff Wayne, Peter Howell, Mike Oldfield, Jean-Michel Jarre, Tangerine Dream, Barry Gray, Ennio Morricone, John Barry, Francis Monkman, Brian Bennett, Paddy Kingsland and countless others.“
Always remaining within the same parameters of late 20th-century popular synthesizer music, the style of each track varies, from a Krautrock influence to epic gaming music to the plastic buoyancy of a Susanne Ciani advertising jingle for Apple Computers, or even a quasi-Kraftwerkian interpretation of electro-pop.
The overall mood is lyrical, optimistic, and at times even bashfully triumphant, in the quaintly ceremonial manner of a pocket symphony, its peppy charm reminiscent of an optimistic yet measured background humming along mechanically perhaps as an accompaniment to a title card announcing scores during the half-time break of a Sunday afternoon sports show, broadcasting the winning teams of regional football tournaments.
Considered as a soundtrack for televisual transmissions, game shows, public announcements, corporate videos, nature documentaries, and other alternative channels of public music production, this style of music was originally composed and performed to underscore slices of life mediated, edited, and illustrated for mass consumption.
This iconographic ecosystem, aimed at the widest possible audience, called for illustrative, popular music whose low-budget production values unavoidably adopted and by default celebrated technological artificiality.
The wide availability, modest budget, and synthetic nature of these recordings made this entire audiovisual cultural output not only a viable solution for public communication purposes and information services but also propagated an aesthetic of futurological romanticism that permeated social infrastructure - from suburban home studios to classrooms, from waiting rooms to planetarium shows, from science documentaries to sports reportage, this synthesized sensibility was as accessible as it was just outside the focus of the pop mainstream at the time it first blossomed.
For a generation of kids like me, growing up in the ‘70s while listening to these synthetic symphonies on educational television programs, video games, and cinema it seemed inevitable to create electronic pop as a response directly inspired by this sonic environment, whose unexpectedly appealing tones and pleasant chord structures were created by a previous generation of musicians originally trained in the classical European tradition but also exposed to the radical experimentalism of Xenakis, Stockhausen, Schoenberg and other pioneers of modernism.
However, when synth music was adopted by the next generation coming of age in the early '80s, the sociopolitical context had changed radically, as the elitist orchestras of the conservatory repertoire were becoming increasingly irrelevant compared to the dynamic expansion of rhythm and blues which had fractured from rock and pop into a million wildly divergent genres, from psychedelic funk to thrash punk to new-age ambient.
Simultaneously to this splintered popular music scene, the post-war economic miracle was well and truly over, so there was a necessity for a pop sound representative of the charged social landscape fueling post-punk 1979 London and NYC
Early electro-pop called for a less institutional, more decadent, latent approach, a balanced approach that retained the harmonic traditions of catchy pop music, most successfully updated for the synthesizer era by Kraftwerk yet also expressing the bleak prospects of a generation faced with the decaying landscape of late capitalism and globalized alienation
This post-apocalyptic tension and darker tone – think of the gothic industrialism of Throbbing Gristle, Thomas Leer, early Human League, Cabaret Voltaire mixed with a healthy dose of effete neo-romanticism a la Visage – is the very specific musical genealogy that informs “In the Shadow of the Bomb”, the latest LP by the British Stereo Collective, released in January 2024, its title straightforwardly announcing its theme clearly, thus setting the parameters to this specific late 20th century moment of post-war pop.
A good example is the opulent second track, which is equally reminiscent of Ghost Town by The Specials and the new romantic Middle European electronic glamour of Visage and Ultravox.
Flaunting a dubby, taut ska beat and riff that bounces unexpectedly under a mournful synthetic fanfare, this odd melange captures from the outset the awkward yet rich juxtaposition of symphonic harmonies, exotic influences, assertive melodies, and cold artificiality
The sonic paradox of soulless technology creating emotive sounds makes for a characteristically British flavor of electronic pop, one whose aspirations adhere to a long tradition of eccentric, independent artistic sensibilities.
With this confrontation between synthetic numbness and human melancholia both remaining unresolved and adopted as a main parameter, each track proposes a revisionist cross-pollination of the various strands of electro-pop that once were disparate alternatives to the guitar-centric/frontman-orientated mainstream formula, each of these diverging iterations dissimilar in style and mood even when belonging to the same trends, circles, and age group.
As an aesthetic statement directly alluding to that very particular late 20th-century moment of concurrently competing but also collectively alternative youth movements, this somber mood permeates the whole album, conceptually fulfilling the premise stated in the liner notes, which speak of a work inspired by the bleak sociopolitical circumstances besetting late '70s and early '80s UK, an era of fin-de-siècle malaise under the threat of imminent nuclear annihilation.
Other such retro influences remain faithful to this same epoch, their provenance not particularly obscure for a listener of a certain age yet always appropriate for this narrative timeline and conceptual context: examples include the baroque chamber electronica of Art of Noise, further explorations in electro dub, or the somber harmonies of Gary Numan
Bursts of intense breaks occasionally pierce the cloudy synth reveries, adding an early '90s jungle or techno edge to the mix, as if extending the record's thematic scope further than its primary range, insinuating the increasing dominance of popular electronic music as a direct consequence of our era's historical forces, our technological angst dictating the aesthetic language of apocalyptic times, machine blues being a natural evolution of popular music, a mutation shaped by unavoidable circumstance.
Silicon Valley Blues for the Century of Disappointment
Text written by Panagiotis Chatzistefanou, Berlin, February 2024
excellent as usual!